


Sack of bones

by pushdragon



Series: All the world is bullet shaped [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-30
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-24 04:53:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4906255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushdragon/pseuds/pushdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames is abducted by the sort of low-life he used to work with, back in the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sack of bones

They talk so loud that their argument carries right through to the boot, where Eames is inching towards the rear of the compartment in search of any sharp protrusion he could use to saw his way through the plastic tie that binds his wrists. They clash like bitter old spouses over every little thing, over whether the highway is quicker than the coast road, over whether they can afford to shoot the half gram in their pocket now or wait until they've made the delivery. 

Eames rubs his forehead against the foul smelling synthetic mat beneath him to stop the blood trickling into his eye, and thinks that if they'd had real brains behind the operation, they'd have got in the boot themselves for a test run to eliminate all these vulnerabilities.

There's an underlying hostility in their verbal push and shove. Three would-be bosses jostling for control and respect, each at the expense of the other. A team stitched together with the fragile thread of avarice, bound to snap at the first threat to self-interest. He'd rate his chances pretty high if he can talk to one of them alone, offer him some incentive to turn traitor. 

"Put that fucking thing away," says the one in the back seat, in a voice gravelly with tobacco abuse. "I said put it away. Cops pull us over, you think he won't kick up enough noise to get found?"

"Give him another whack on the head," replies someone from the front seat. "That'll keep him quiet. He won't have nothing to say then." His laugh is either young or unbalanced.

"Go on, break his head then. Give him a good crack."

"Serve the fucker right," proclaims a thick voice, probably the one he smacked in the face with the kettle when they jumped him at the door of his hotel room. 

"Serve you right if you break his skull. He'll be as good as a corpse to us then."

"I'll show you a corpse."

"Hey, fuck off man. I'm driving. Put it away."

It's been so long since he worked with these kinds of bottom feeders that it's a jolt to remember. All it takes is one of them to lose track of the plan for an instant and shoot him. Stupid or psychotically volatile, or just so inured to empathy that killing a man is no bigger a deal than forcing the lock on a car door, all it takes is one. 

The inside wall of the boot yields nothing sharp enough to cut him free. When he tries to roll over to get access to the mechanics behind the indicators, his knees catch on the roof and, wriggle and shove as he might, there's no moving any further. He shifts his mind forward.

What they want isn't hard to guess. They want the secret to pulling off an inception, and Eames is their short-cut to getting it. No patience for the exhausting to-and-fro of strategy, the endless testing of each level and the intricate choreography within it. Not for these louts the soul-destroying weeks of crafting plan after plan and then tearing it down again to identify yet more weaknesses that needed to be shored up. Instead, they are here to take what Eames has in his head by the quickest means possible, and he can predict what that will be. 

When they reach their destination, he'll have to give them something. If necessary, he'll give them the truth. He'll give them Cobb and Yusuf, whose dreamshare work is hardly secret, and Saito, who can take care of himself. He'll keep Ariadne's involvement under wraps as long as he can. And Arthur. He'll give Arthur up first, before the first cut is even put in him, because at all costs he has to keep their dreamshare competitors from guessing how one of them could be used against the other.

They've been travelling two and a half hours, he estimates, when they pull over at last. He can hear the horn of a sea freighter. As he feared, they've brought him to a port, to ship him out of the country, so they can take all the time in the world to work on him. He's damp around the back of his neck. He has to force himself to focus on cataloguing everything his limited senses can tell him, every useful scrap of information.

The boot opens. It's deserted, almost midnight. The floodlit rectangles of the port buildings are a hundred metres off. When they cut his ankle ties, he gives them about four slumped seconds before he lurches up and runs in the other direction, with everything he has in him. He prays that the beats he heard before might belong to a nightclub, something public and well stocked with security. He's out of luck. As he rounds the bend, all he can see is a wide set of tail lights receding into the distance and a long, neglected park. A few steps later, two of them tackle him onto the asphalt, ripping the skin off his chin and leaving him with a mouthful of blood. He clocks one of them in the belly with his boot as they hold him down. The click of a safety catch behind his ear, though. That brings an end to his struggles. 

"Can't blame a man for trying," Eames manages to say with a grin as the weight of one man eases off him. "You'd want your brother to do the same, am I right?"

"Hey!" He hears urgent footsteps, and turns in time to see that the bleached-haired passenger is aiming his pistol at a point near the back of Eames's right knee.

The gunman says sullenly, "Stop him pulling that trick again," and his finger tightens.

"Watch the artery, won't you?" Eames says in the steadiest voice he can muster, and looks away.

"Don't leave a blood trail, you idiot. May as well draw arrows on the ground, pointing right to us."

No-one moves. Eames has a vivid image of the first week in the Trocadéro flat, lifting Arthur up onto the kitchen counter, both of them breathless, his mouth on Arthur's bare shoulder. He won't be able to do that with a shattered kneecap, he thinks. He won't be able to do a lot of things.

He holds his breath. Then the safety clicks back on. "Yeah well if he runs again, it's on you mate. It's on your fucking head."

There's a subtle, treacherous shaking in Eames's limbs as they march him back to the car and then on towards the floodlights of the deserted port complex. His legs and numb arms feel dissociated from his body. He remembers the exit from that messy Kisumu job. Arthur with his arm sliced up by shrapnel from the blast in the zinc furnace, Eames with his ribs fractured and his head still echoing from Worner's beating, both of them keeping their feet only by clinging to each other's trajectory, holding each other steady. He matches his steps to the oldest of the three, the chain smoker, but he knows that you get to be an old man in this industry by being the smartest, the luckiest, or the most willing to smash a crowbar over a mate's head while his back is turned and walk away. 

They've got a crate prepared for him in a warehouse. He watches them drill breathing holes into the sides. It will get him disorientated, dehydrated and knocked about by the time he reaches their destination. But that's okay because they passed an oil drum full of rubbish on the way in, and Eames now has a broken-handled screwdriver tucked up his sleeve, which will be enough to get him free before the forklifts come at dawn to load the ship. 

The first nail has barely gone in, sealing him into the crate, when he hears the ring of one phone and then the other. There's a tone of disbelief, a long objection, a curse, then silence. The nail creaks out of the crate lid and he's tipped unceremoniously out the side. The smoker slashes through his bindings with two swift strokes of his blade. 

"Fuck off," he says, gesturing to stairwell. "No questions."

Eames gives him a nod, as if to say there's no hard feelings, because he doesn't especially fancy being shot in the back, and leaves at a jog.

There's a long walk to the town centre, a grim negotiation with the taxi driver and an even grimmer one when he demands his hotel pay the driver in cash and put it on the credit card he checked in with.

He calls Alex as soon as he gets back to his room. "Hi. Arthur said you might ring. Are you all in one piece?"

"Yeah," Eames says tightly as his the act of talking tugs at the half-congealed wounds along his chin. "Mostly."

Truth be told, he can feel the kickback of all the adrenalin starting to drag him down. He paces as far as the phone cord will stretch, because if he sits on the bed he might never get up again. 

"We're getting you out of there. I'll read you the address. There'll be a phone and a Visa card waiting. Be ready for the taxi in five minutes."

"Okay."

It only takes him three to salvage the best he can of his scattered belongings and stumble down the stairs, ignoring the ring of the telephone behind him. In the foyer, he shrugs off the receptionist's call too, and shoulders his way through the front door and onto the street. He passes out in the back seat of the taxi, swooping in and out of consciousness with every sharp corner or sudden stop. 

By the time they reach the marble and brass lobby of his new accommodation, it demands all his attention to cover his head wound with a cap and hold himself up long enough to stagger through check-in and face plant in the middle of a huge white and beige bed.

When he wakes up, the heating is blowing comfortably warm and Arthur is lying on top of the covers beside him. His jacket is off, one of his socked feet pressing lightly against Eames's through the layers.

"You're a mess," Arthur says, and leans over to kiss his split lip.

"A fucking eyesore," he agrees, testing the tender hinge of his jaw. "Head feels like a boiled cabbage. Looks worse, I expect."

Arthur makes an equivocal sound. 

He dozes again after than, a different sort of sleep this time, free of the jarring feeling that the delay could be fatal, that closing his eyes at all is a risk he can't afford. Later, he's dimly aware of Arthur getting up, moving around the room. His voice steady and efficient on the other side of a door. Later still, he senses Arthur return to the room and linger, hears the welcoming tinkle of ice in a glass.

"Don't mind if I do," Eames says, pulling himself up to lean against the headboard. 

Arthur fixes him what looks like a sparkling mineral water, and spoons in some ice from his own glass. "What was the last painting you sold?"

"What?" He screws up his face, dragging the details out of the depths of memory. "It was a third-rate Degas. Supposedly. A half-finished model sketch, one leg, one arm and a bit of tutu. The paper trail was patchy as hell. I let the buyer's agent screw me down by two-and-a-half percent. Easy enough to make another one next week."

Arthur hands him the glass and squeezes his way onto the narrow strip at the edge of the bed. 

"Good. I tried to wake you when I got here. You were--" He glances down to the tumbler in his hand. "--uncooperative."

It surprises him to hear that. His unconscious self is usually a bit too eager in proximity to Arthur, crowding him onto one side of the bed, or groping him with mindless insistence on the other side of a drunken midnight. It's a habit that time is not discouraging as it should, and Arthur's long absences to rekindle contacts in the US research community don't help either. 

Eames's thoughts get clear enough to travel back in time, from the hotel, to the port. "Was that your work then? Their sudden change of heart." 

With one firm nod, Arthur's expression turns rueful.

"I thought it was me they'd come for. I had plans for that. You've been out for almost a year, it made no sense to make you the target. They must have seen your picture on one of the social pages for the exhibition and grabbed their chance."

He subdues the burn of resentment at being left out of the loop on that one, as if working out of a fixed office had confined his interests into an equally narrow conventional field. 

"Not always about sense. You know better. Mick Tierney's lot, was it?"

"The little brother. Their falling out seems to be more permanent than we thought. Cel hears word that he's building his own business."

Eames feels the damage across his chin, which is gritty and scabbed, but will heal up by next week.

"What did you do?"

"There's a side business back in Belfast. The usual – arms and low-end meth. He didn't want it burned to the ground. Even a rat like Andy Tierney can get sentimental about the trade he started in. Especially if he's using his own kid as a courier."

"Well." Arthur's eyes are bright with satisfaction, so he thinks there's hardly any point in mentioning the screwdriver. "Thanks."

The plates on a dinner service trolley rattle as they pass through the corridor outside, leaving nothing in their wake but the hum of the heating fan.

"How's the face?" 

A brief pause, and Arthur raises his hand to stroke his thumb over the edge of the graze on Eames's chin, then up onto a stretch of unspoiled skin under his bruised cheekbone, rests his fingers on the side of Eames's neck and goes still. Eames's voice escapes him for a moment. They don't do a lot of this in-between stuff. A touch is most often an invitation to sex, and if it doesn't start that way, it quickly ends up there. He doesn't mind that, the separation, the knowing which side of the line they're on. It makes him easy in his skin when he kicks back on a kitchen chair, halfway through a story about a customer with a furtive predilection for artworks featuring nuns, to watch Arthur empty out the spice rack and chuck non-compliant containers into the rubbish. Two professionals at the peak of their skills. 

But now, his heart bursts into action at the touch. His nerves are raw, as if last night's grazes had stripped more than just a layer of skin off him. He turns to brush a kiss over the meat of Arthur's thumb, just as his hand withdraws. 

"Mmh," Eames replies with a grimace. "Boiled cabbage. Like I said."

"A shame."

He's familiar with the expression Arthur turns on the distorted shape of his lips. It's the one he catches sometimes when he pulls on an old sweatshirt that strains against his build, or comes in wet from washing the car, or climbs down from replacing a light fitting.

He turns Arthur's hand over on his knee. Two of the knuckles are split and bruised, looks recent. He holds on when Arthur goes to pull away, grasps Arthur's wrist in the span of his fingers. He tries to direct his craving into something specific, maybe one of those impeccably thorough blow jobs that Arthur knows how to string out for a dizzy half-hour or more. But it doesn't want to settle. 

"How sore are you?" Arthur asks, turning purposeful as he puts down his glass.

There's warm blood in his veins. His kneecap is still connected to its tendons. In another twist of time they could be finding his body right now, in a dumpster outside the port complex, a fractured skull, a severed finger, a sleeve of cigarette burns. 

"Just a bit bruised," he answers. "Take it easy, huh?"

Arthur tugs lightly at Eames's blood-matted collar. "I'll run you a bath," he says, knuckles warm over Eames's pectoral for a lingering moment. "You have no idea what you look like right now. I think you've been a bit unfair to the brassica family, actually."

Eames closes his eyes and listens to the industrious sounds from the bathroom. When the water shuts off, he peels his shirt off and throws it scrunched into the bin, and shucks his shoes and trousers. The water is prickly hot and perfect. 

Paused in the doorway, Arthur is reviewing the whole set-up critically: depth of bath water; placement of towels; selection of toiletry bottles. The frown he's wearing, Eames used to think it was something like contempt.

He gives his shoulders a cautious roll, arms moving stiffly in their sockets. "Fucking Europeans. Always stinting on space. Like there wasn't enough to go round."

Coming back over, Arthur shifts the bathmat with the toe of his shoe so he can kneel down. He dips the washcloth in the water as Eames adds, "Give me one of those fat American gas guzzlers any day."

Arthur does go easy on him then, squeezing the washcloth and letting the hot water do its gentle work. 

It's unearthly good, all of it. The sigh from deep in his lungs says more than he means to.

The second job he worked had ended with their twenty-three year old mark left comatose for seven months, and the client riddling their base with machine-gun fire. All because Stefan Belanova mixed around Somnacin with the same heavy-handed negligence he'd formerly applied to amphetamines, working on the logic that once you'd stepped outside the law, concepts like right and wrong became hollow slogans that only weaker, stupider men believed in. 

Arthur drapes the cloth over the shoulder joint, where the heat slowly penetrates the tightest of the strained tendons. 

The cuff on Arthur's free hand is resting on the side of the tub, concealing everything except a few strands of dark hair. His shirt is a fawn coloured base with stripes of warm chocolate and a darker brown in variable thicknesses; a complicated pattern that disappears into an impression of elegant simplicity when Arthur adds it to his wardrobe. He lays his fingers beside the crisp line that binds the cuff to the sleeve. Drops of water bleed into the fabric. 

"Hard to believe I ever worked with those idiots," is all he manages to say.

After a while, Arthur picks up the cloth and resumes where he left off. 

"I'm going to bring Keenan in on the biotech job. Feed her a few hints about how we pulled off an inception. Give her a story to take back to Belfast. This--" His mouth jerks, thin, unhappy. "This can't happen again."

"It'll have to be a good story," Eames tells him. "Maybe even a little bit of truth among the fiction."

"We've got time to work on it. I don't need to be back in Boston for a week."

Eames has an exhibition opening he should be getting back to. Eighteen million dollars' worth of artworks about to be landed and hung. But the last day has shaken up his priorities a little, and Arthur is waiting for his answer like it's the only question on his mind. 

"All right."

They both lean into each other at the same time. The water sloshes and then calms as their mouths come together. They go tenderly on his torn lip, but the slow obstacle of it makes the kiss all the more distinct. It's the sort of kiss Eames knows he'll come back to, later, when two months' separation is starting to feed his doubts, when he's losing track of what he's prepared to give up and what he isn't.

Afterwards, Arthur fills the kettle with lukewarm water and they wash the dried blood out of his hair. 

"Son of a bitch," Arthur says out of nowhere. Eames follows his gaze to see the bath has turned a nasty shade of rust. "All this because Andy fucking Tierney can't find a team with the brain power to put together his own inception."

"Gotta give him some credit, though." He waits until Arthur's attention has turned to him, hot with objection, and grins. "At least he was smart enough to try to steal from the best."

**

Later, in the aftermath of one of those impeccably thorough blow jobs that Arthur knows how to string out for a dizzy half-hour or more, his thoughts unshackle themselves from the present and drift into the realm of possibility.

Arthur had expected to be the target all along, he'd said. How might it have gone if their positions had been reversed? If Eames had been the one forced to jump on a plane, knowing full well he might be too late to save anything except a scarred and empty shell of a body. A sack of bones and a strange, unresponsive face. Watching the ground below slip past, too slow, and tormenting himself with the memory of last times and missed opportunities.

He reaches for Arthur's hand and rubs his thumb across the roughening torn skin. 

"Bring me in on your biotech job. I'll give you a hand with Keenan."

"It's better we don't work together right—"

"You're wrong there. It's better that we do."

He tightens his grip. Things creep up and surprise you, just when you thought you had the measure of them. All his life, he's leapt from risk to risk, and never felt the weight of it till now. 

"This art swindle," he goes on, cheerfully parting company with the truth. "It's as old as any other game when you’re tied to it nine to five."

The truth is, he's thinking about Boston, and Washington DC. Where Arthur is slowly insinuating himself back into the network from his college days. Knocking on the sort of doors that open with a bio-coded swipe, rather than a crowbar. He's thinking that that side of Arthur is still almost a stranger to him, but he can picture it. Arthur closing a deal with that smooth, unyielding handshake, all neutral tones and immaculately memorised facts, nothing about him to reveal that he can calculate at a glance the exact dose of tranquiliser it would take to render you unconscious for precisely ten, thirty or sixty minutes.

He wants to see it unfolding first-hand, all that potential and all those lovely contradictions. Sometimes it pisses him off, how he always seems to be the last to know, when the ground has shifted beneath them yet again.

He hears himself say, "I'm ditching it after the show's done. Time for some new horizons."

Just then, his phone buzzes. It's a text from Freddy. _Back already? U fail at kidnapp._

Arthur grabs the phone from him and starts typing a reply with angry jabs of his thumbs. It hasn't got old, the pleasure of watching Arthur's rebukes fall on someone else's head. Not one bit. 

"Your buddy in the Department of State. Can sort out a visa, can he?"

Finally, Arthur shuts off the phone and chucks it. "Sure. If it's a hands-down emergency. What do--" He cuts off, turns to Eames slowly. "You hate the East Coast. You said it's full of the sort of tossers who'd bulldoze an apartment block to make a stick to stir their bellinis with."

Eames spends a few moments slipping down under the covers, tugging his pillow straight. Some days he can't fault Arthur's shameless self-indulgence when it comes to luxury hotels.

"Absolutely shitting money though," he grins.

What he remembers most vividly, from that botched job, is how Arthur had let go his grip on Belanova's collar a millisecond after the first bullet shattered a window, and turned, and started pushing down filing cabinets to make the shelter that would save them all from the onslaught. He zeroes in on what's essential, and does it. 

"I'll get right on that then."

Instead, he stretches his legs out under the covers, skin shifting over his bare ribs as he flexes his arms. It lights a pleasant, leisurely fire in Eames's belly that could end up in a lot of places. 

"In the meantime, Arthur. Come here."

**

**Author's Note:**

> This is from an idea that 321liftoff suggested to me. It kind of worked out to be less abduction and more lounging around in hotel rooms not exactly saying the things that need to be said, but thanks for the inspiration anyway!


End file.
